Doing something new in an existing company culture

Talk given at Tech4Africa 2013 about being aware of your self as you try to do new or different things in an existing company or culture. Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAg3cMzDFdY

Transcript

1. Doing something different Bradley Whittington / @darb VP Web Products, Mxit
2. It’s hard
3. It’s tiring
4. I don’t have a magic formula
5. Let’s talk about me
6. I work for Mxit. We have ±100 employees.
7. It wasn’t always like this.
9. Motribe. ±8 employees.
10. * not Mxit’s offices
11. Enough about me, let’s do cool things
12. First, let’s talk about me.
13. I’m an ENTP* *Myers-Briggs personality type indicator. (extraversion, intuition, thinking, perception)
14. The Visionary.
15. The ability to solve puzzles and problems that have no obvious way to resolution.
16. The ability to define schematically a new structure or design and know it will work.
17. A tendency to be arrogant or boastful, or to demean those who cannot see the same answers
18. The inability to deal carefully and calmly with the finer details of a situation or work in progress.
19. You bring your self into a situation
20. Find the elephant in the room project
21. Start small, focused, isolated
22. Prove your approach
23. Win kudos
24. Or, quit. Your talent is wasted.
25. Mxit Launch Platform for app creation ±Single MongoDB document per request Cached cleverly, aggressively Database per app 300 authors 9M pageviews/month 2M monthly unique users 4 m1.small 1 amazon core, 1.7GB ram
26. Thanks Brad Whittington email: brad@mxit.com twitter: @darb github: bradwhittington mxit: darbydarb slides: https://speakerdeck.com/u/bradwhittington/ homework: read http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen